Storage Virtualization: The Evolution of Storage Networking and the Current Trends in the Industry

This session sets the stage for other other three lectures at Data Storage Day. We start by looking at how today's enterprise SAN and NAS solutions evolved from humble direct-attached disk and file servers. We then turn our sights to the industry trends that are shaping the current wave of innovation.

Specifically, we are interested in deduplication, storage virtualization, solid state storage devices (SSDs), automated management of tiered storage, cloud storage, "object" storage, and massively scalable file systems.

Deduplication and Single Instance Storage: Practical Applications for Backups, Archiving , and Primary Storage

Deduplication (dedupe) and single instance storage (SIS) are perhaps the hottest topics in the storage industry. Recently, EMC acquired a dedupe starup for over two billion dollars! Meanwhile, all of the leading backup vendors are scrambling to integrate dedupe into their products. But this is just the beginning of a major new technology trend! Dedupe offers benefits not just for backups, but also for cloud storage, archiving, virtual desktops, and even primary storage for high performancy production servers and VMs.

• The first section discusses the fundamental technology of dedupe, revealing both the shortcoming of current approaches and the opportunities for new solutions.
• The second section focuses on dedupe for backups. We illustrate different ways to integrate dedupe into backup system as well as reveal non-dedupe approaches that might deliver similar results at lower costs.
• Lastly, we describe applications for dedupe and SIS outisde of conventional backups and archiving. Use cases include virtual desktops, rich media archives, cloud storage, and primary storage for physical and virtual servers.

Application Acceleration with Solid State Storage

The data storage industry is experiencing a mini renaissance as a flurry of new solid state storage devices come to market. SSDs are now available in a broad spectrum of price, form factor, and performance, It is hard enough for a storage architect to sort out the myriad of choices, but that is nothing compared to the challenge of figuring out how to deploy SSD technology in an affordable and effective way. 

This lecture focuses on practical approaches for integrating SSD technology into your existing storage infrastructure. We explore different insertion points in the storage I/O path for cachin and SSDs and in turn reveal a variety of methods for accelerating databases, email systems, virtualization platforms, content repositories, local file systems and network file systems (NAS).

• Type of flash media: SLC, MCL, DRAM
• Packaging options for solid state storage
• Differentiating random from sequential disk I/O patterns
• SQL database acceleration
• MS Exchange acceleration
• File system tiering acceleration
• Dynamic tiered storage in a SAN Array
• Application-level QoS
• 3rd party caching appliances
• Solid state storage with deduplication

A Primer on Object Storage, Cloud Storage, and High Capacity File Systems

The hype surrounding cloud computing has spilled over into the storage industry, inspiring tremendous innovation in the fields of object storage and large scale file management. Conventional file storage technologies (enterprise NAS systems) cannot scale limitlessly, not to mention that they are too rigid to expand and contract  with the ebb and flow of the cloud. The cloud demands a whole new class of file systems and storage management approaches. As luck would have it, the problems being tackled in the name of cloud storage are applicable to large scale storage management in private facilities. In other words, these innovations are relevant regardless of whether one ever plans to store data in the cloud.

This session looks at the current state of cloud storage solutions while definining the basic terminology and illustrating the major problems left to solve. Special focus is given to object-based storage models as alternatives to conventional file systems.